Manuel Corpas (scientist)

Last updated
Manuel Corpas
MannyCorpas.jpg
Portrait of Manuel Corpas
Born
Manuel Corpas Lopez

Malaga
Alma mater University of Navarra
Known for
Awards Software Sustainability Institute 2016
Scientific career
Fields Bioinformatics
Genomics
Institutions
Thesis Folding Patterns in Protein Sequences  (2007)
Doctoral advisor Terri Attwood
Website

Manuel Corpas is an Anglo-Spanish biologist and entrepreneur known primarily for his contributions to the field of Bioinformatics and Genomics. Currently Corpas is Chief Scientist of Cambridge startup Cambridge Precision Medicine, [1] a tutor at the Institute for Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer at the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja. Manuel worked on the human genome from the beginning of his career, being one of the first consumers to sequence and his own genome and that of close relatives, which he published as the Corpasome. [2] He has held positions at the Earlham Institute as Project Leader, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, developing the DECIPHER database, a database that aids in the diagnosis of patients with rare genomic disorders.

Contents

Education

Corpas gained his Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Navarra in 2000. He was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2007 by the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor Terri Attwood and Dr Steve Pettifer studying the evolutionary conservation of folds in proteins. [3]

Academic service

During his PhD Corpas started the International Society for Computational Biology Student Council (ISCBSC), [4] the international organisation of computational biology students. The International Society for Computational Biology officially approved the Student Council in 2004 with Corpas as its inaugural Chair. To date the Student Council has numerous Regional Student Groups around the world touching many thousands of students in the field. [5] [6] Corpas has also organised the first Student Council Symposium in Computational Biology at the European Conference in Computational Biology in Madrid (2005). Additionally, he served as the chair of the first conference of bioinformatics in Africa by the African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Research and career

After a few months at the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute in Madrid under Alfonso Valencia and the European Bioinformatics Institute under Ewan Birney, Corpas settled at the Wellcome Sanger Institute as developer of the DECIPHER database under the supervision of Dr Helen V. Firth. [7] Since then he has been working in the field of human genome research and personal genomics. During his tenure at the Wellcome Sanger Institute he initially focused on the development of integration and visualisation tools for interpretation of Copy Number Variation datasets. [8] [9] A while later, he started his work in the ‘Corpasome’. [10] [11] [12] He was among the first people to make public on the internet his personal genotype from 23andMe, terming the process “genome blogging". [13] Soon after his family analysed their genotypes using 23andMe data first and then human exome technology and more recently whole genome. [14] This has led to a number of important publications in the field of personal genomics, [15] performing the first crowdsourced analysis of a family of genomes. [16] During the end of his tenure at the Sanger Institute he organised the BioJavaScript (BioJS) community to become its coordinator since 2012 until 2017. The BioJS community is the greatest effort to date in the provision of open source web components for biological visualisation. Corpas’ research group has been involved in some of the most important developments of this open software community. [17] [18] [19] BioJS involves efforts from world leading resources such as the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Berkeley Lab, Cambridge University and others. Corpas was successful in obtaining 5 internship for the Google Summer of Code, which catapulted BioJS as an international effort.

Corpas has also been the Technical Coordinator of ELIXIR-UK, [20] the UK branch of the ELIXIR European network for bioinformatics and data resources. During his time as ELIXIR Technical coordinator he has been involved in the development of best practices and standardised metrics to measure the impact of data resources across Europe. During this time he also was involved in the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training, [21] [22] acting as the chair of their technical committee and the development of their training portal, which provides open access training resources for the bioinformatics community.

As well as his work at Cambridge Precision Medicine, Manuel is a Tutor at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, [23] and also teaches online courses in precision medicine in both English and Spanish. Manuel has over 50 peer reviewed scientific publications to his name, [24] and a book Perfect DNA, [25] in which he explores the wider issues beyond the science of genetic sequencing.

Awards and honours

Corpas is a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, [26] and a frequent speaker in world renown events in genomics such as Festival of Genomics London, BioData West, the Longevity World Forum and others. He has been catalogued as one of the leading people in from Málaga (Spain) having an impact in the world. [27]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bioinformatics</span> Computational analysis of large, complex sets of biological data

Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is referred to as computational biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BioPerl</span> Collection of Perl modules for bioinformatics

BioPerl is a collection of Perl modules that facilitate the development of Perl scripts for bioinformatics applications. It has played an integral role in the Human Genome Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biopython</span> Collection of open-source Python software tools for computational biology

The Biopython project is an open-source collection of non-commercial Python tools for computational biology and bioinformatics, created by an international association of developers. It contains classes to represent biological sequences and sequence annotations, and it is able to read and write to a variety of file formats. It also allows for a programmatic means of accessing online databases of biological information, such as those at NCBI. Separate modules extend Biopython's capabilities to sequence alignment, protein structure, population genetics, phylogenetics, sequence motifs, and machine learning. Biopython is one of a number of Bio* projects designed to reduce code duplication in computational biology.

Computational genomics refers to the use of computational and statistical analysis to decipher biology from genome sequences and related data, including both DNA and RNA sequence as well as other "post-genomic" data. These, in combination with computational and statistical approaches to understanding the function of the genes and statistical association analysis, this field is also often referred to as Computational and Statistical Genetics/genomics. As such, computational genomics may be regarded as a subset of bioinformatics and computational biology, but with a focus on using whole genomes to understand the principles of how the DNA of a species controls its biology at the molecular level and beyond. With the current abundance of massive biological datasets, computational studies have become one of the most important means to biological discovery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ewan Birney</span> English businessman

John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Haussler</span> American bioinformatician

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Society for Computational Biology</span> Scholarly society

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfonso Valencia</span>

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References

  1. ↑ "CPM - Homepage". www.cpm.onl. Retrieved 2019-09-04.
  2. ↑ Corpas, Manuel (2013). "Corpasome". figshare. doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.693052.v3 . Retrieved 2019-09-04.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. ↑ Corpas, Manuel (2007). Folding patterns in protein sequences (PhD thesis). University of Manchester. doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.964811.v1.
  4. ↑ Corpas, Manuel (August 2005). "Scientists & societies". Nature. 436 (7054): 1204. doi: 10.1038/nj7054-1204b . ISSN   0028-0836. PMID   16144051. S2CID   186242202.
  5. ↑ "ISCB-SC RSGs" . Retrieved 1 February 2017.
  6. ↑ Macintyre, Geoff (2013). "The Regional Student Group Program of the ISCB Student Council: Stories from the Road". PLOS Computational Biology. 9 (9): e1003241. Bibcode:2013PLSCB...9E3241M. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003241 . PMC   3784494 . PMID   24098107.
  7. ↑ www-core (webteam). "Helen V Firth". www.sanger.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-09-04.
  8. ↑ Firth HV, Richards SM, Bevan AP, Clayton S, Corpas M, et al. (April 2009). "DECIPHER: Database of Chromosomal Imbalance and Phenotype in Humans Using Ensembl Resources". Am. J. Hum. Genet. 84 (4): 524–33. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.03.010. PMC   2667985 . PMID   19344873.
  9. ↑ Swaminathan GJ; Bragin E; Chatzimichali EA; Corpas M; et al. (2012). "DECIPHER: web-based community resource for clinical interpretation of rare variants in developmental disorders". Hum. Mol. Genet. 21 (R1): R37–R44. doi:10.1093/hmg/dds362. PMC   3459644 . PMID   22962312.
  10. ↑ Corpas M, Cariaso M, Coletta A, Weiss D, Harrison AP, Moran F, Yang H (12 November 2013). "A Complete Public Domain Family Genomics Dataset". bioRxiv   10.1101/000216 .
  11. ↑ Corpas, Manuel (2013). "Crowdsourcing the Corpasome". Source Code for Biology and Medicine. 8 (1): 13. doi: 10.1186/1751-0473-8-13 . PMC   3706263 . PMID   23799911.
  12. ↑ Corpas M, Valdivia-Granda W, Torres N, Greshake B, Coletta A, Knaus A, Harrison AP, Cariaso M, Moran F, Nielsen F, Swan D, Weiss Solis DY, Krawitz P, Schacherer F, Schols P, Yang H, Borry P, Glusman G, Robinson PN (Nov 2015). "Crowdsourced direct-to-consumer genomic analysis of a family quartet". BMC Genomics. 16 (910): 910. doi: 10.1186/s12864-015-1973-7 . PMC   4636840 . PMID   26547235.
  13. ↑ Corpas, Manuel (2012). "A genome blogger manifesto". GigaScience. 1 (1): 15. doi: 10.1186/2047-217X-1-15 . PMC   3626510 . PMID   23587446.
  14. ↑ "Corpasome at BMC". blogs.biomedcentral.com. 28 June 2013. Retrieved 2020-09-29.
  15. ↑ Corpas M (June 2012). "A Family Experience of Personal Genomics". Journal of Genetic Counseling. 21 (3): 386–391. doi:10.1007/s10897-011-9473-7. PMC   134180 . PMID   22223063.
  16. ↑ "Keeping It in the family". www.sciencemag.org. Retrieved 13 August 2012.
  17. ↑ Corpas; Jimenez, Rafael; Carbon, Seth J; García, Alex; Garcia, Leyla; Goldberg, Tatyana; Gomez, John; Kalderimis, Alexis; Lewis, Suzanna E; Mulvany, Ian; Pawlik, Aleksandra; Rowland, Francis; Salazar, Gustavo; Schreiber, Fabian; Sillitoe, Ian; Spooner, William H; Thanki, Anil; Villaveces, José M; Yachdav, Guy; Hermjakob, Henning (2014). "BioJS: an open source standard for biological visualisation – its status in 2014". F1000Research. 3: 55. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.3-55.v1 . ISSN   2046-1402. PMC   4103492 . PMID   25075290.
  18. ↑ Thanki, Anil S.; Caim, Shabhonam; Corpas, Manuel; Davey, Robert P. (2014). "DNAContentViewer a BioJS component to visualise GC/AT Content". F1000Research. 3: 54. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.3-54.v1 . ISSN   2046-1402.
  19. ↑ Thanki, Anil S.; Jimenez, Rafael C.; Kaithakottil, Gemy G.; Corpas, Manuel; Davey, Robert P. (2014). "wigExplorer, a BioJS component to visualise wig data". F1000Research. 3: 53. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.3-53.v2 . ISSN   2046-1402. PMC   5054804 . PMID   27781080.
  20. ↑ "ELIXIR-UK – UK life science infrastructure for biological information" . Retrieved 2019-09-04.
  21. ↑ "Committees | GOBLET". www.mygoblet.org. 16 November 2014. Retrieved 24 August 2016.
  22. ↑ Corpas, M.; Jimenez, R. C.; Bongcam-Rudloff, E.; Budd, A.; Brazas, M. D.; Fernandes, P. L.; van Gelder, C.; Korpelainen, E.; Lewitter, F.; McGrath, A.; MacLean, D.; Palagi, P.; Rother, K.; Taylor, J.; Via, A.; Watson, M.; Schneider, M. V.; Attwood, T. K. (2015). "The GOBLET training portal: a global repository of bioinformatics training materials, courses and trainers". Bioinformatics. 31 (1): 140–142. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu601. PMC   4271145 . PMID   25189782.
  23. ↑ "Manuel Corpas - Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)". ice.cam.ac.uk. 12 July 2018. Retrieved 2020-09-29.
  24. ↑ "Manuel Corpas - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2019-09-04.
  25. ↑ Manuel Corpas (2016). Perfect DNA. Cambridge: DNAdigest. ISBN   978-1539783725.
  26. ↑ "Fellow Software Sustainability Institute". software.ac.uk. 2016. Retrieved 2020-09-29.
  27. ↑ Hoy, Málaga (2016-04-10). "Los números 1 malagueños". Málaga Hoy (in Spanish). Retrieved 2019-09-04.
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